Bless Online shutting down in Korea, Steam version is now the sole focus

Another bomb just dropped right on the heads of Bless Online players, as Neowiz today announced that the Korean servers will be shutting down for good. No Rebuild, no more trying, this time it's for good – on November 19, 2018 at 7PM PDT (11/20 at 3AM UTC), Bless Online Korea is over. Bless Online Russia is pretty much dead, and we can't find any actual info on the Japan server, but it's Neowiz itself that says that “the Steam version of Bless Online is our sole focus.”

No worries, right? Neowiz remains committed to launching Bless Online in North America and Europe later this year, and to go all the way to make it “successful for years to come.” No, really, the official statement really says that, to hell with the ‘Overwhelmingly Negative‘ rating of the last 30 days, with only 16% of positive reviews. Oh, and the player base is becoming quite a depressive sight – I'm pretty sure that most of those players don't regret purchasing Early Access for Bless Online, a game that was free-to-play everywhere but suddenly released as buy-to-play in North America and Europe.

Neowiz Bless Studio will now focus its resources to take Bless Online out of Steam Early Access and into the official release. There is no mention of switching it to free-to-play, but either this will happen or Bless Online will surely be entirely forgotten, as no one in its right mind is going to purchase a mess of an MMORPG with extremely negative reviews.

On the other hand, Neowiz's resources may not be that vast, as the surprising announcement of the Xbox One exclusive Bless Unleashed surely requires quite a few hands to work on it. Round 8 Studio or not, these are resources that could have turned Bless Online into a better game, but are now directed to a console MMORPG that no one really asked or wants, given the failure of the PC release.

Bless Online was once one of the most ambitious MMORPGs in the making, being announced in 2011 and demanding a huge investment from Neowiz. It will probably go down in history as one of the biggest disappointments in MMORPG history.